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| Faber-Castell Polychromos |
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| Mount Vision |
I love painting in pastel. Pick up a
pastel stick, and you've got immediate color. Paint with it, and it
calls up all the pleasure you had as a kid finger-painting. Pastel
is also how I got back into painting, so it has a very special place
in my heart.
But here's my problem with pastel.
It's not easy to restock your pastel box.
I keep my pastels sorted in two ways in
my Heilman Pastel Box. First, by hue: Green, blue, violet, red,
orange and yellow. (I also have a couple of spots where I stash a
few browns and greys.) Second, by value, with dark at the top and
light the bottom. If I've recently restocked the box, painting is a
real pleasure.
But over time, such as when I'm
travelling cross-country teaching workshops, sticks I use frequently
get worn down to nubs. Sometimes I even run out of a color. By the
time I'm ready to restock, I have to pull out each nub with tweezers
and try to match it against my color chart. (See my color charts, above.) For the colors I
exhausted while en route, I have to take a long, hard look at my box
to see what's missing. Sometimes I don't see what's missing until I
need that particular color again.
Restocking the box is, in my mind, a
project on the level of doing my annual taxes. And, I have to admit,
I restock the box about as frequently as I do my taxes.
I know there are many systems out there
for restocking your pastel box. As any of you who've taken my
workshops know, I'm a pretty organized guy. I have a good system,
so long as I keep on top of it. That's the way with any system - you
have to keep on top of it.
My system for restocking my oil
painting box is far easier. I have eight tubes of paint. If one
tube looks low, I grab a backup. I always keep at least one backup
of each color in stock. Keeping track of eight oil colors is a snap
compared to keeping track of several hundred pastel sticks.
All that said, I love pastel. If you
want to grab color and go, there's nothing like it.
Next time: The Problem with Oils.
